Wednesday, July 22, 2015

In the News: Des Moines Register

Jail inmate helps Iowa’s transgender learning curve

If
all goes according to plan, Meagan Taylor should be out of Polk County
Jail and heading home to Belleville, Ill. Thanks to the generosity of
strangers, her Iowa bond has been posted and the five-year-old Illinois
fines that triggered her arrest warrant from that state should be paid.

But
as the circumstances leading to Taylor’s July 13 West Des Moines arrest
prove, all can’t be trusted to go according to plan, especially when
you’re black, transgender and on a trip to a new place with a trans
friend. Your appearance might be deemed suspicious by the hotel manager,
setting off a call that brings police to your room. An outstanding $500
fine, incurred when you were 17, might now have escalated to $1,713 and
generated a warrant. Had you come from wealthy stock, that might have
been paid off long ago, buffering you from the indiscretions of youth.
Then you might not have given the wrong name when police showed up at
your hotel room. Had you not been transgender, the hormone pills you
take to make your physical being match your mental one probably wouldn’t
have been in your purse.
Iowa already tops the nation in the rate at which it incarcerates black people. Add in trans and you’re likely out of luck.

We
might hear these statistics, but when a Meagan Taylor, whose legal name
is Derez Flowers, comes along, we get to see how it works in real life.
“It’s still hard to be black and transgender,” said Taylor Tuesday in
an interview in her cell in the medical unit of Polk County Jail. “You
get racially profiled. They think we’re all doing stuff.”

For all
her problems, Taylor comes across as a sweet 22-year-old who
unsuspectingly landed in a bad spot, when all she really wants to be
doing is nails and hair. She goes to cosmetology school and works in a
salon. But she also got lucky: Her story inspired an outpouring of
donations topping $4,000 in just a few days. The fund drive was taken up
by Megan Rohrer, a Lutheran pastor in San Francisco with the Welcome
Ministry, after a column on Taylor appeared in this space last week.
Locally, activists have picketed the Drury Inn — which remains tight
lipped — on Taylor’s behalf.

She also drew support from an
unexpected place: the jail itself. “The jail had a lot to do with
getting my story out there,” said Taylor. It was Polk County Sheriff
Bill McCarthy who reached out to me about Taylor’s story because he
wanted aspects of it to reach the LGBT population, and get their input
on how some things should be handled. McCarthy says there’s “a
disconnect” between law enforcement and some sectors of society. “Issues
like this should not be resolved by the justice system alone,” he told
me. “There has to be input from society in general.”

That
seems an awfully enlightened position for a county sheriff to take.
McCarthy said Caitlyn Jenner has helped serve as a catalyst. He thinks
in Hollywood, this would be a “ non-issue,” though I suspect it would
still be one, maybe just less of one. “It’s an issue here,” he said,
“because we haven’t crossed those bridges yet.”

This is also
significant because Taylor had complained earlier of feeling alone and
isolated in the medical unit, and some activists around the country took
that to mean she’d been placed in solitary confinement. Some critics
slammed the jail, even going so far as to say it bordered on “torture,”
said Donna Red Wing, who heads the LGBT organization One Iowa. She
visited the jail Tuesday and was impressed with the care officials have
taken with Taylor. They are bound by state law that requires men to be
placed with men and women with women. But given the high incidence of
assaults nationally on transgender inmates, jail officials wouldn’t put
Taylor in a male unit. They also said she had requested protective
custody, so they housed her in what the jail director calls the
“penthouse” of the facility — with a television, hospital bed and
telephone access.

Taylor
now says she has been treated very well and that jail officials
stretched to give her access to people who could help her.

There’s
a learning curve all around; that’s inevitable. But maybe the lesson is
that the best way to handle the discomfort of an unfamiliar situation
is to try and get more educated and familiar with it, rather than jump
to the worst conclusions — as Drury Inn seems to have done. For all that
Taylor had to endure, this story has an uplifting twist in the way that
some people who never met her — maybe never met a transgender person at
all — reached out in outrage and empathy to support her. If only we all
only followed our better instincts.

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The Rev. Dr. Megan Rohrer the pastor of Grace Evangelical Lutheran Church and Executive Director of Welcome - a communal response to poverty in San Francisco, CA. Pastor Megan is an author, artist, activist and educator who speaks and preaches nationally on issues of homelessness, sexuality and gender. Pastor Rohrer was a 2014 honorable mention as an Unsung Hero of Compassion with His Holiness the Dalai Lama, was named honorary royalty and presented a Medal of Tolerance in Indonesia, received an Honorary Doctorate from Palo Alto University, Distinguished Alum award from the Pacific School of Religion in Berkeley, is an award wining historian, musician, filmmaker and was a finalist for a Lambda Literary Award in transgender nonfiction. ResumeSermon Archive